
- 104 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
About this book
What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or "a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself"?
Nicky Beer's latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.
Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini's operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they're right. "Listen /to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music. "
Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Drag Day at Dollywood
- Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale
- Cathy Dies
- Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf
- Etymology
- Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs
- Thorn Ostinato
- Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944
- Forged Medieval German Church Fresco with Clandestine Marlene Dietrich
- The Benevolent Sisterhood of Inconspicuous Fabricators
- The Magicians at Work
- Sawing a Lady in Half
- The Great Something
- The Plagiarist
- Notes on the Village of Liars
- Excerpts from The Updated Handbook to Mendacity
- The Stereoscopic Man
- Self-Portrait While Operating Heavy Machinery
- The Demolitionists
- Small Claims Courtship
- Exclusive Interview
- Marlene Dietrich Meets David Bowie, 1978
- Marlene Dietrich Considers Penicillin, 1950
- Mating Call of the Re-Creation Panda
- Scat
- Heart in Turmeric
- Dear Bruce Wayne,
- Elegy
- Kindness/Kindling
- Juveniles
- Nessun Dorma
- The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts
- Because my grief was a tree
- Specimen #17
- Revision
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author